Meaningful Labour, Employee Ownership, and Workplace Democracy: A Comment on Weidel (2018)

Abstract

Timothy Weidel has argued that Martha Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities should be amended to include a capability for meaningful labour. This paper extends Weidel’s ideas, arguing that meaningfulness in the workplace cannot be addressed without critically examining the formal ownership and management structure of businesses. Through specific examples, I argue that capabilities scholars and practitioners ought to encourage the proliferation of employee-owned and democratic businesses as a part of their human development strategy.

Keywords:

• Martha Nussbaum
• capability approach
• economic development
• human development
• workplace democracy
• employee ownership
• cooperatives

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the audience at the 2019 HDCA meeting in London; the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback; the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University for its support; and Kenneth Stikkers, David Ellerman, and David Ciepley for discussion.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

About the Author

Lucas McGranahan is Senior Research Specialist at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University. His research interests include economic democracy and the history of philosophy. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Notes

1 Technically, the membership is usually comprised by those workers who have passed through a probationary period and opted to buy in. Worker cooperatives are not to be confused with other forms of cooperative (e.g. consumer cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and producer cooperatives) whose membership is comprised by a different class of stakeholder. A typical cooperative grocery store, for instance, is owned and controlled by its customer-members and is a conventional employer vis-a-vis its staff.

2 This pattern may reflect that the cooperative structure does not incentivize growth per se but rather income-per-member (Ward 1958).

3 This attenuated notion of ownership, along with other considerations, may lead us to drop the notion that shareholders own a corporation at all (Ciepley 2013).

4 As Weidel notes, Nussbaum has drawn attention to a highly valuable democratic institution promoting collective self-determination in the informal economy: India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) (Nussbaum 2011, chap. 1).

5 See Williamson (2009). Notably, Rawls believed there was one other form of political economy compatible with justice: liberal democratic socialism (with collective control of major productive assets). I take it to be an open question which system the capabilities approach should favour. Interestingly, some radical mechanisms for property-owning democracy—for instance, universal capital accounts in which all citizens own equal shares of all public stocks—blur the line between capitalism and socialism, showing the limits of that dichotomy.